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We all know that the IT industry is one of the hottest and most lucrative fields around these days. But do you know which specific IT jobs are considered the top 10 IT jobs? The list below details the best of the bunch and the information you’ll need to get into one of these careers yourself.

An Overview of the Top 10 IT Jobs

Information technology jobs are big commodities now and will remain so in the future. Between now and 2016, the number of these jobs is expected to increase by 37%. The average rate of growth for jobs in general during this same time period is only projected to be 9-11%. Although job prospects will be excellent throughout the IT field, many of the best jobs are going to require higher levels of training and experience. At the top of those specific professions, however, six-figure salaries are quite common in many jobs.

The Top 10 IT Jobs

Here is some information about the top 10 IT jobs that are currently available:

• Lead Application Developer — As a lead application developer, your job is to manage the teams that are responsible for developing software. That means you can play an important role at every stage of the development process, including designing, coding, and testing the software. Generally, you will need a bachelor’s degree in computer science as a minimum education requirement, and most employers will want you to have at least 3 to 5 years of experience in software development under your belt as well. On average, you can expect to earn between 100,000 and 160,000 per year in this position. Unfortunately, this is one of the few IT jobs that is expected to decline in numbers slightly in the next few years, so opportunities may not be as plentiful.
• Application Architect — When a new application is needed, the architect is the mind behind its construction. That means you’ll be responsible for designing the different parts of the application, including the interface and infrastructure, based on the standards provided by the client. Although the minimum education required is a bachelor’s degree in computer science, your chances of securing employment are better if you have a master’s degree. You can also expect to be required to have at least 8 years experience in developing software and applications. The anticipated salary for this position is between 100,000 and 140,000. The good news is that this is going to be a fast growing field, with a current projected growth rate of over 30% over the next decade.
• Messaging Administrator — These administrators are responsible for helping companies stay in touch with one another. They handle email systems, including fixing problems with the systems and providing back-up options to ensure that none of the messages are lost. You should expect to be in demand a great deal with your employer. A few years of experience working with the same systems that your potential employer uses is highly desirable, as is at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science or information systems. The salary range for messaging administrator jobs is about the same as that for application architects.
• Data Modeler — In this position, you are going to be responsible for developing models to illustrate data flow. To accomplish this goal, you will need to analyze vast sets of data requirements. Most employers are going to be looking for past experience working with data management, as well as a bachelor’s degree in a computer-related field. The anticipated salary for this type of work is between $74,000 and $102,000 per year, while the anticipated growth in this area is about 38% over the next decade, which is considerably higher than average.
• Network Manager — As a network manager, you will play a crucial role in maintaining the company’s networking technology. You will be required to work with other team members to make sure the network is up and running correctly at all times. Because the position is one of immense responsibility, employers want you to have at least 10 years of experience in the field, in addition to management experience. The average salary for this position is between $75,000 and $99,000 per year. Like most IT positions, job growth is expected to reach nearly 40% by 2016.
• Senior IT Auditor — For this position, you will be responsible for developing the review procedures for ensuring that the company’s computer systems are meeting the industry standards. You’ll establish testing and evaluation plans, as well. The position typically requires a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a similar field. Most employers look for at least 5 years of experience working directly with an IT auditing team. You can earn between 98,000 and 150,000 in this position. Again, expect phenomenal job growth in this area.
• Senior Web Developer — As the head web developer, you’ll be responsible for handling all aspects of the process to bring your applications to the Internet. That includes working with the development and marketing staff. Most employers want to be sure that you have at least 5 years of experience working with a wide variety of web-related technologies. A degree in computer science is also necessary. The salary for this job is between 95,000 and 130,000. Again, these positions should increase by about 37% by 2016.
• Business Intelligence Analyst — In this role, your position will be to create the methods for data analysis. You’ll also be responsible for a number of other issues as well, including reporting on solutions and analyzing data that can be communicated to senior management in the form of reports. You will need a bachelor’s degree in a computer-related field and a number of years of direct work experience. The average salary is between 92,000 and 130,000 per year. Job growth is expected to be comparable to growth for the other IT positions.
• Staff Consultant — In this position, you’ll need to work with your colleagues for project planning. Usually, you’ll need to have a bachelor’s degree in computer science or business. You will also need to have at least 2 years of experience in business and in consulting. The average salary for this type of job is between 75,000 and 93,000. This field is expected to increase by 78%, which is the highest rate of all the top 10 IT jobs.
• Tier 2 Help Desk — Although not one of the most prestigious of the top ten IT jobs, working at the tier 2 help desk is essential. You would take the calls that can’t be solved by the Tier 1 staff, and you have to filter out the issues which require in-person service. Having past help desk experience is essential. Most employers would also like these employees to have either a two- or four-year degree in computer science. The salary for these jobs is typically between 45,000 and 56,000 per year. As more companies expand their computer and technology products, more help desk staff will be needed, so strong growth is expected.

Are you someone who is fascinated with the world of computers and how systems go together? Do you understand the serious nature of computer crimes and what you need to do to make sure that you are going to be able to protect yourself and the things that you care about in a digital fashion? If so, you’ll find that it is time for you to consider a career as a computer forensic specialist.

Computer forensic specialists are people who are at the top of their fields when it comes to computer security and if you are someone who likes the idea of working as a computer and data defense agent, this might be the career path that you want to walk down.

In the first place, take a moment to consider what sort of schooling you will need. To make sure that you can get the job that you are after, take some time and consider which degrees you will need. Digital forensics positions might be looking for people who have degree qualifications in computer forensics, in computer science, in engineering or in criminal justice; and the more time that you spend looking into the work, the better off you are going to be. Make sure that you know what the position entails and what your options are going to look like. Because you may end up collecting evidence of state or federal legal proceeding, a criminal justice background can be very helpful.

When you are thinking about becoming a computer forensic specialist, look into what training courses you are going to need. There is a lot of demand for people to fill these positions at the moment and when you are looking to find the certifications that you need, remember that you should look online as well as offline. Colleges and universities alike will offer online degrees, though when you are looking for something that is more hands on, you might want to look for a degree that is offered at a local university or college. Take a moment to think about what your options might be and how you can get the training that you need.

If you want to be a computer forensic specialist, consider the different certifications that you can take in the market. Some certifications are more general than specific and in general, they can range from things like computer crimes against children to file recovery. Some of the more well known ones will include Certified Forensics Analysis, Certified Electronic Evidence Collection Specialist, Certified Hacking Forensics Investigator Certification, and Certified Computer Examiner Certification. What kind of certification best suits you and where do you want your career to take you? With the right certification, there is no telling how far you can go.

Take a moment to think about how your work as a computer forensic specialist can help you get the results that you are after. If you are ready to move forward and to make sure that you have the career that you want, consider how this one might work for you!

Information Technology (IT) job market is packed with millions of highly talented, technical individuals who can make a difference in any industry they choose, but many are taking a stand against job loss by making successful career changes into marketing. Now, you may be concerned about how an IT professional fits into the marketing world â?? it is quite simple.

IT jobs require technical dispositions, analyzing trends, and adapting to the changes in a minute notice. Marketers endure the same demands as they reach for their customers in different mediums including radio, Internet, direct mail, and more. IT professionals are experienced in changing their interests in network jobs into people management. If you are interested in changing from your software job into a marketing executive, we have a few tips to help you make the transition.

Maintain Contacts

Anyone you have met during your IT career may be a good reference while you search for a marketing position. The reality of strong networking includes adjusting your image from an IT pro into a savvy tech with marketing skills. Integrate all of this into your new image, rebuild your reputation in producing results from markets, and work your network to help in your job search.

Learn the Basics

Take a few marketing courses in order to get your feet wet. You may have learned a number of tricks over the years, but trends change significantly faster than the IT industry. Marketing requires knowledge of the complete basics including market research, creating marketing plans, and using media budgets to buy positions as well as to create marketing materials for presentations. All of your knowledge of IT will not go to waste; in fact, you may become a double-sword in an organization in need of your technical expertise.

Gain Experience

After you take a few courses, gain experience by working with small businesses in your local market. Integrate your multi-talented resume, create proposals, and offer to work for free (if necessary) to add to your repertoire. Majority of unemployed IT professionals integrated their technical skills with marketing to start their own IT firms; you can go that route or enter the marketing field full-time. Whatever you do – you must transfer skills into results whether it is for network jobs, software jobs, or marketing consulting.

Transfer Skills Into Results

How many skills do you have? Are you a great communicator? Can you articulate ideas, plans, and justifications in a matter of moments? Do you listen to details in a way that makes people confident in your abilities? If so, marketing is the perfect place for you to stay to keep your skills sharp while working with people from different industries in a new light. All of your skills including web development, programming, and technical writing can go a long way in a different slant – for instance, consider writing technical manuals for marketing purposes.

The path that you take for changing your career may include new certifications, gaining experience, maintaining contacts, and transferring skills into results. Knowledge of either industry can capitalize into a different kind of world – fun, easy, and appreciative.

In a world replete with regulations and threats, organizations today have to go well beyond just securing their data. Protecting this most valuable asset means that companies have to perpetually monitor their systems in order to know who did exactly what, when, and how — to their data.

Database logging only tells you what has happened on your database, not what is happening. Even then, the log details probably won’t be enough to satisfy compliance requirements. What is needed is a new way to audit databases without impacting their performance.

How do you know what’s going on inside your database? The traditional answer is to use transaction logs or run trace utilities. Logging database activity is fine in its way — but it is only reactive. You’ll only ever know what has already happened on your database, which is like finding that the bank has been robbed, rather than knowing that the bank is being robbed — and then being able to do something about it. The other problem with logs is granularity — the logs may not capture enough detail or may miss out completely on certain critical activities such as a read operation on sensitive data.

The traditional alternative is to run trace utilities. The trouble with traces is that they consume CPU cycles. It has been estimated that running the DB2 audit trace has a CPU overhead of around 5% per transaction when all audit trace classes are started. IBM estimates that DB2’s global trace can add 100% CPU overhead when all audit trace classes are started.

It seems that what we have is one technique that is inadequate and another that is impractical. So, perhaps the important question to ask is, why should we bother? The answer is because of compliance regulations. There are two key regulations that apply — the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

And while we’re thinking of compliance with auditing regulations, who would usually be the person responsible for reviewing the logs or running and examining trace utilities? That would be the DBA. To comply with auditing requirements, you also need some way to check the DBA’s activities to ensure that he isn’t the person “robbing the bank”, so to speak.

So far we have four criteria for a successful database-auditing tool. It must:
Comply with the latest regulations,

Audit DBA activity as well as all the other users of our database,

Not impact on the performance of the database,

Have a way of identifying in real-time any problems, i.e., any violations of corporate policies.

Many sites have implemented Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools, a hybrid of Security Information Management (SIM) and Security Event Management (SEM) tools, thinking that will help solve the problem. While they do import log data from a range of systems and network devices, they have one flaw. They don’t natively monitor DBMS activity information, and they require the DBMS utilities to be turned on.

An ideal solution would run off the mainframe to not impact the mainframe’s performance, while, at the same time, monitoring and tracking all database activity in real-time.

Fully compliant auditing solutions store, analyze, and report database information. They can identify anomalous behavior and policy violations immediately and respond with policy-based actions, such as security alerts. Database activity is captured at the DBMS level, and it can capture activity initiated by a mainframe-based applications and networked applications. It can also monitor by role or by application, which helps to meet auditing requirements.

A robust database access auditing solution that addresses regulatory compliance should be able to provide answers to at least the following questions:
Who accessed the data?

At what date and time was the access?

What program or client software was used to access the data?

From what location was the request issued?

What SQL was issued to access the data?

Was the request successful; and if so, how many rows of data were retrieved?

If the request was a modification, what data was changed? (A before and after image of the change should be accessible.)

Knowing who is doing what to your data and when will protect your data and your company.ng data from different tables in the databases. It should not try to archive at the file or row level because of the way business data can be spread about. Thirdly, this archive process needs to be policy driven and automated.

Not only does the data have to be in the archive for possibly decades in order to comply with regulations, it also has to be accessible to authorized people and must be retrievable using standard SQL queries. In addition to access and retrieval characteristics, it’s important to be able to produce reports about the data using standard techniques.

The next important archive characteristic is compliance with Section 802 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and rule 240.17a-4 of the Securities and Exchange Act (1934). These regulations affect the authenticity of the archive. Companies face severe penalties if they alter or delete their archived data. So, for compliance reasons, the archived records must be stored in a format that is both non-rewritable and non-erasable.

If data from a database archive is restored, then it needs to go back into the same columns and tables in which it originally existed. Information about these tables and columns is called metadata, so for an archive to be successful, it must also store the metadata along with the data. Over time the database may be modified as new versions are brought out, or, with company acquisitions and mergers, the database in use may change. This is why archiving the metadata is so important. No matter what happens, the archive data will remain accessible in its original format. In terms of compliance, recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) affect the discovery of electronically stored information. Rule 34b states that, “A party who produces documents for inspection shall produce them… as they are kept in the usual course of business…” So, basically, this means that the archive data has to be independent of the originating database.

Once data has reached the end of its “legal life” and is no longer required to be retained, the archive solution should have a policy for the automatic deletion of that data from the archive.

In the event that litigation occurs or is pending, data is placed in a litigation hold. That means it cannot be deleted or changed for any reason. Having decided what information might be available and needed in the court case, the next stage is to be able to locate that data in the archive. This is where e-discovery can be used. It is important that the archive stores data in a way that allows e-discovery tools to work fairly quickly. There have been cases where huge fines have been imposed because electronic documents have not been produced in a timely fashion (For example, Serra Chevrolet v. General Motors). Once litigation is over, the data may still have a long legal life ahead of it before it can be deleted.

It almost goes without saying that if archives are to store data for up to 30 years that they will be very big. Figures in petabytes (1015 bytes) have been suggested. The analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group concluded that between 2005 and 2010 the required digital archive capacity will increase by more than a factor of 10 — from 2500 petabytes in 2005 to 27,000 petabytes in 2010.

Sophisticated archiving systems will prevent data from being altered or deleted, while at the same time allowing it to be accessed and retrieved. The archive data is stored on a storage area network (SAN) using encapsulated archive data objects (EADO), which allow access and retrieval of data from the archive, while also maintaining the authenticity of the data and preventing it from being overwritten or deleted. This ensures that users are compliant with the growing list of regulations today and tomorrow, and also for many decades into the future.

What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.Organizations are generating and keeping more data now than at any time in history. Most companies understand the importance of archiving their data, but compliance with new regulations means that a database archive solution must not only work today, but must still be effective 30 years from now.

There are many reasons to archive. Databases are getting bigger — Gartner has quoted growth rates of 125%. In addition, the type of data that can be stored in a database has increased. Originally, databases stored characters and numbers and dates and times, but DB2 9.1, for example, happily stores unstructured data such as images, video, and XML documents.

Large databases perform less well than smaller ones. They require more CPU, and back-ups and REORGs take longer. This is the reason organizations began archiving data. They later found that they could use this archived data for data mining activities — such as finding which marketing strategies had worked best in the past or for providing ideas for seasonal variations in sales.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to archive is compliance with regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and BASEL II, plus what is estimated to be over 150 state and federal laws. These regulations dictate the length of time that electronically stored information (ESI) needs to be retained. Indeed, the regulations — and they do depend on the industry — have increased data retention periods from 20 to 30 years or more. Compliance with these regulations will drive demands for data archiving solutions.

So what do we actually mean by database archiving? It has been defined as the process of removing selected data records from operational databases that are not expected to be frequently referenced again and storing them in an archive data store, where they can be securely retained and retrieved as needed, and then discarded at the end of their legal life.

So the first part of any archive strategy must be to store data that is not needed to complete a business transaction (operational) or that is not needed for reporting or other queries (reference). Secondly, it needs to archive related records associated with a business object — which will involve taking data from different tables in the databases. It should not try to archive at the file or row level because of the way business data can be spread about. Thirdly, this archive process needs to be policy driven and automated.

Not only does the data have to be in the archive for possibly decades in order to comply with regulations, it also has to be accessible to authorized people and must be retrievable using standard SQL queries. In addition to access and retrieval characteristics, it’s important to be able to produce reports about the data using standard techniques.

The next important archive characteristic is compliance with Section 802 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and rule 240.17a-4 of the Securities and Exchange Act (1934). These regulations affect the authenticity of the archive. Companies face severe penalties if they alter or delete their archived data. So, for compliance reasons, the archived records must be stored in a format that is both non-rewritable and non-erasable.

If data from a database archive is restored, then it needs to go back into the same columns and tables in which it originally existed. Information about these tables and columns is called metadata, so for an archive to be successful, it must also store the metadata along with the data. Over time the database may be modified as new versions are brought out, or, with company acquisitions and mergers, the database in use may change. This is why archiving the metadata is so important. No matter what happens, the archive data will remain accessible in its original format. In terms of compliance, recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) affect the discovery of electronically stored information. Rule 34b states that, “A party who produces documents for inspection shall produce them… as they are kept in the usual course of business…” So, basically, this means that the archive data has to be independent of the originating database.

Once data has reached the end of its “legal life” and is no longer required to be retained, the archive solution should have a policy for the automatic deletion of that data from the archive.

In the event that litigation occurs or is pending, data is placed in a litigation hold. That means it cannot be deleted or changed for any reason. Having decided what information might be available and needed in the court case, the next stage is to be able to locate that data in the archive. This is where e-discovery can be used. It is important that the archive stores data in a way that allows e-discovery tools to work fairly quickly. There have been cases where huge fines have been imposed because electronic documents have not been produced in a timely fashion (For example, Serra Chevrolet v. General Motors). Once litigation is over, the data may still have a long legal life ahead of it before it can be deleted.

It almost goes without saying that if archives are to store data for up to 30 years that they will be very big. Figures in petabytes (1015 bytes) have been suggested. The analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group concluded that between 2005 and 2010 the required digital archive capacity will increase by more than a factor of 10 — from 2500 petabytes in 2005 to 27,000 petabytes in 2010.

Sophisticated archiving systems will prevent data from being altered or deleted, while at the same time allowing it to be accessed and retrieved. The archive data is stored on a storage area network (SAN) using encapsulated archive data objects (EADO), which allow access and retrieval of data from the archive, while also maintaining the authenticity of the data and preventing it from being overwritten or deleted. This ensures that users are compliant with the growing list of regulations today and tomorrow, and also for many decades into the future.